Sooner Savvy

From the amalgam of Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and hardbitten white frontiersmen who settled it, Oklahoma somehow evolved as a state that was not distinctively Western, Southern or Eastern but marked by a conglomerate sectionalism all its own. Today its cultural patterns are Eastern, its outdoor way of life Western, and its political style distinctly Southern.

For years, Oklahoma's Carl Albert, Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, has been a power second only to the Speaker. And until death silenced his oratorical thunder in 1963, the Sooner State's Bob Kerr had no peer among the exalted unofficial overlords of the Senate. When Okla homa sent Fred Roy Harris to sit in Kerr's Senate seat, it was like a zephyr taking over from a monsoon. Or so it was assumed.

Last week stocky, square-jawed--and somewhat square--Fred Harris, at 37 the second youngest U.S. Senator (after Ted Kennedy), achieved national prominence as a result of his influential role within the President's Commission on Civil Disorders. Said a commission staffer: "He was a conscience to all of us and a prod to crystallizing a unifying view." That view, reflected in the commission's report, is not universally applauded--as Harris foresaw. To those who were queasy about castigating racism in American society, Harris snapped: "It strikes me that no one in this country is poor because he is white. But many are poor because they are black."

Expecting the Unexpected. If that didn't unsettle his basically conservative constituency (it is only 6% Negro), his votes last week to invoke cloture to end the civil rights debate and to defeat an antiriot measure undoubtedly did. But Harris' own Senate colleagues have come to expect the unexpected from the new-style Sooner, a tough-minded, blunt--and brave--political tightrope walker. After only three years in the Senate, Harris is already regarded as a possible future Democratic leader.

As the son of a Mississippi-born sharecropper, Fred Harris is a liberal by osmosis. "He had to work like a dog for everything he has," recalls Earl Sneed, his former law school dean. "Consequently, he would be very sympathetic to those who are disadvantaged." A Phi Beta Kappa and No. 1 graduate of his University of Oklahoma law class, Harris has pretty well known where he wanted to go since, at age five, he led a horse around in circles to power a hay baler. He wanted to get an education and rise to the top. He married his Comanche Indian sweet heart, LaDonna Crawford, great-granddaughter of a medicine man named Hoahwah.

At 26, Harris was a state legislator, and at 33, after finishing fifth in a gubernatorial primary, he won the remaining two years of Kerr's Senate seat by upsetting ex-Governor J. Howard Edmondson (who had appointed himself Senator after Kerr died) in another primary, then edging famed Oklahoma Football Coach Bud Wilkinson in the 1964 general election. Now he and LaDonna, who have three little Indians of their own, move in Washington's more rarefied social circles.

Ambivalent Eater. Back home, however, Harris is in some disfavor. Though he will not have to run again until 1972, he has aroused the enmity of Oklahoma conservatives, who condemn his position on race and civil rights. Critics call him "politically ambivalent" because he "has lunch with Johnson and dinner with Bobby Kennedy"-which, occasionally, he does, and which is only one indication of his savvy, eupepsia and party loyalty.

But most Oklahomans take pride in his rise to national prominence in the tradition, if not the manner, of Carl Albert and Bob Kerr. At any rate, Fred Harris is not likely to change his stripes. Says he: "If you get away from what you think is right, you are in terrible trouble. Then you don't know what you stand for any more, and you won't know how to defend yourself."

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